Those cubs, poking their heads out of the snow for their first fresh air after wintering in their mom’s den, pop up in the opening minutes of a gorgeously photographed BBC nature documentary (released by Disney).

Included at no extra charge is the mandatory dose of eco-hectoring. Surely “only fragments remain” isn’t the proper way to describe the more than 1 billion acres of forest in North America alone. (Also, isn’t man one of the animals entitled to a habitat? But maybe the deer are working on a documentary gravely warning one another that their species is ravaging the fragile ecosystem of the Hamptons.)

From the North Pole we gambol and gallop across the globe, to one of the best movie chases of the year (wolf and baby caribou), to the deserts of Africa (elephant vs. 30 lions — and these kitties play rough), to the southern oceans where humpback whales feast on an all-you-can-eat krill buffet.

As Woody Allen put it, nature is “spiders and bugs, and big fish eating little fish, and plants eating plants . . . It’s like an enormous restaurant.” With a floor show: In a tropical rain forest, a hilarious bird puts on a Hugh Jackman-caliber show in an effort to woo a female — who flies away without even a good-night kiss.

Portions of the movie could disturb very small children. Even I cringed when the leopard’s jaws closed around the neck of his leggy but fatally klutzy prey — I think it was a bewilderedbeast.

And I laughed when the narration began: No, surely not James Earl Jones? Yup. He even says, “This is the circle of life.” Jones’ voice box has been a cliché for so long that Morgan Freeman’s has had time to come out of nowhere and pass it on the hackneyed charts. Jones’ script, moreover, is given to campy pronouncements such as “Hot! And cooooold!”

The impossibly lush images of “Earth,” though, shame the flat digital phoniness of your average blockbuster. Swooping helicopter takes make a gallery of desert dunes and their mysteriously beautiful windswept shapes. Underwater, schools of fish dancing away — at 70 mph — from the rapiers of their Zorro-like predators form amazing geometric patterns.

An amusing coda that plays over the credits gives us a look at some of the photographers, a few of whom took their camera up over Africa in a hot-air balloon that promptly crashed into tree branches. Fortunately, no hyenas were around to heckle.